You Are Not Alone: Holocaust Survivors & The New Year

A deep silence followed the question — not confusion, but something older, heavier. I worried that I had touched a place shaped by years of fear and loss. As the quiet lingered, I felt the weight of what these survivors have carried.

I was leading a High Holiday program for Café Hakalah through my work at JF&CS, where I support Holocaust survivors and walk with people through grief, loss, and life’s hardest transitions. Many in this group are Russian-speaking, shaped not only by the Holocaust but also by decades of Soviet repression. Their childhoods were marked by fear, by rituals practiced in secret or not at all, by families who protected identity through silence.

The question I had asked was simple:

“What is the first time you remember hearing the shofar?”

The first answer reflected the silence that had filled the room. One man shared that he had never heard the shofar as a child — it was banned, and people were afraid. He didn’t hear it until he came to the United States.

But then another man spoke, and the story moved in a direction none of us expected.

He began recalling September of 1948, when he was eight years old. The synagogue in Moscow — closed for years — had been permitted to open for Erev Rosh Hashanah. He remembered crowds pressing in, the sense of something historic unfolding.

And he remembered who walked into the sanctuary that night: Golda Meir, the newly appointed ambassador of the still-young State of Israel. Israel had been established only months earlier, and she had come to the Soviet Union carrying a message that Soviet Jews had longed to hear:

“You are not alone. We have not forgotten you.”

After she spoke, the shofar sounded. It was the first time he had ever heard it — not hidden, not whispered, but blown in a room packed with Jews who had waited years for such a moment.

When he finished his story, there was another pause — but now it felt full, almost electric.

Then another man said quietly: “I was there too.”

And a third: “I remember it. I wasn’t near the front, but I was in the synagogue that night.”

Three men, now in their nineties, living in the United States, suddenly realizing they had once stood together in Moscow as children — hearing the same shofar, witnessing Golda Meir’s message of connection, feeling the emergence of a State that claimed them even when their own government tried to erase them.

The emotion that followed was unmistakable: tears, nods, a sense of being seen by one another in a way that transcended the years.

It reminded me how rarely we ask our elders — especially survivors of profound trauma — to share the memories that shaped them. We fear stirring pain. We forget that within their stories also live pride, resilience, and moments of astonishing clarity.

These survivors lived through Nazism and Stalinism. They rebuilt their lives. They raised families. They created futures that once seemed impossible. And now, at ninety, they are still willing to remember — and to teach.

What rose in the Zoom room that day was more than memory. It was a reminder that history is not only recorded; it is carried. And when those who carried it begin to speak, they open doors we didn’t know were there.

And it was a reminder, too, that we must keep asking — gently, humbly — while they are still here to answer.